Twitter as a Second Brain

The ultimate tool for learning in public#

“It’s like Evernote with a slot machine.”

- Visakan Veerasamy

One way to consistently add value as part of your Twitter engagement is to stop thinking of every interaction as a transaction or a professional interaction. Sure, on some level, you could argue for this, but it probably doesn’t help. Nice people don’t keep score. It’s better to think of Twitter as the ultimate tool for learning in public.

Tweet out anything insightful#

Tweet out anything insightful that you learn. We’ve discussed summarizing podcasts and talks, but you can go a LOT further. Share interesting quotes attributing the source. Screenshot pages of books you read with key sentences highlighted. Record videos of amazing demos. Learn in public.

Publicly searchable record#

Note that this works for you even with zero followers. Because you are using Twitter as a note-taking app, you now have a free, immutable, publicly searchable record of everything you’ve learned.

280 characters format#

You might chafe at the format. 280 characters isn’t a lot to work with, but constraints are sometimes blessings in disguise. In this case, you are forced to summarize everything and break up your summaries into multiple tweets if you need to. This makes every tweet an interactable and linkable chunk of knowledge-- fast to read and trimmed of excess fat. Because it’s so short, there’s no point spending too much time on it either.

It turns out this is great for the future you and the people who follow you. All content must be condensed to this tiny format-- bigger than a headline and smaller than a paragraph. It means that everyone (loosely) has an even playing field, and you aren’t allowed to ramble on without getting straight to the point. For those familiar with the Faustian bargain of Google AMP, Twitter is “AMP for thoughts”. From the consumption side, Twitter is RSS reborn.

Open-source knowledge#

What’s great about tying a social network to your note-taking is that your followers have an equal chance of benefiting from your notes, as they do contribute to them. Instead of a comment section all the way down at the bottom of a blog post or YouTube video, they can chime in at the appropriate spot. I have learned a tremendous amount from people pointing out related resources and readings. This informal, spontaneous, collaborative learning is a form of open-source knowledge and can be very powerful for building your knowledge, reputation, and network all at the same time.

A final tip: Tweet threading works across time; power users call this a Zettelkasten or Memex. You can explore that concept on your own.